Security Industry Parts From Gene Schultz

Schultz was one of the co-founders of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams

Dr. Eugene Schultz

Eugene Schultz, known as one of the founding fathers of the security industry, recently passed away after suffering an unrecognized stroke two weeks prior to his death.

In the official obituary, his colleague and friend,Gene Spafford, CERIAS executive director, wrote ”Gene was one of the more notable and accomplished figures in computing security over the last few decades. During the course of his career, Gene was professor of computer science at several universities, including the University of California at Davis and Purdue University, and retired from the University of California at Berkeley.

“He consulted for a wide range of clients, including U.S. and foreign governments and the banking, petroleum, and pharmaceutical industries. He also managed several information security practices and served as chief technology officer for two companies.”

According to SC Magazine, Howard Schmidt, a Cyber-Security Coordinator of the Obama Administration, revealed that the man was different from the rest because not only did he manage to identify a problem, but he always quickly found a way to fix it.

“You'd never get a sense [from him] that we were getting beat down with the complex issues we were dealing with. Even the last time I saw him, earlier this year, he had boundless, happy energy, saying, ‘We can do this and fix this stuff.’ ,” revealed Schmidt about the optimistic man he knew for 25 years.

During his long career, Schultz wrote more than 100 papers and 5 books on security and for a period of 5 years he was editor-in-chief of the Computers and Security journal.

Besides being the one that alerted the world on dangers such as spam or vulnerabilities in applications, he was also valued by the US governing bodies where he provided his expertise on digital protection related issues.

NASA also took recognition of his work, awarding him with Technical Excellence Award and the Department of Energy Excellence Award.

The world will remember Gene Schultz as a mentor, philanthropist, a security guru and a great individual who treated everyone as his equals, sharing his love and consideration with family and friends.